Bodega Bay, Sonoma Coast State Park (Goat Rock), & Fort Ross

2012.06.20

Day Sixty Four. Headed still further north. The first stop of the day, which was supposed to be little more than a quick pit stop turned out to be the find of the day. The scenery at Bodega Bay was almost too much. Every time I turned around, I wanted to take another hundred photographs. Realizing that this was going to subsume our entire morning, I broke out the tripod and did a ton of long exposure work with the waves crashing over the coast. Most of the shots exposed perfectly at five seconds (which should tell you a little something about how bright it was and ... spoiler alert: i got ridiculously sun burnt). Not sure why, but almost none of the coastal long exposure shots were ruined with the maroon colour shift (though, unfortunately there still were a few victims). The colour shifts appear seemingly randomly and ... I can't figure out how to control them ... but I'd rather not concentrate on the negative with such an awesome set. After Bodega Bay we headed up to Sonoma Coast State Park to see Goat Rock and an absolutely massive natural arch, which I believe is unnamed, but is big enough that it should have a name. Goat Rock looked exactly like it did in all of the Google Images Search pictures ... it's kind of funny though, I must have lined up the shot on the waterline of Goat Rock itself, thinking that that would be horizontal ... right? Nope. Since I was shooting down at it from pretty high up, the induced perspective made that line about 2.5 degrees off from horizontal, which was more than just a little apparent when looking at the horizon in the background ... so I only ended up keeping the most zoomed out shot I got of it, since it had enough space around it to rotate it back to flat. After that, we headed up to Fort Ross, an old Russian (Russian?!) fort. The fort itself was closed (you know, because a Wednesday is a great day to not be open) so we only got to walk around it, but still managed to get some cool shots of both it and the coastline behind it. We then attempted to stop in Salt Point State Park, but, despite being a state park, there was nowhere to pull over, so we continued on to Gualala (I still have no idea how to pronounce that, and yes, I verified the spelling). The last few shots of the set came from the trail behind the hotel that we thought would lead to Gualala Point County Park, but instead, dead ended rather abruptly as noted by the sign in the last picture o_O